The Division of Allusions

A member of the socialist union said to me: 'You are pretending to be an independent journalist but you don't dare write that the socialist law on privatisation was composed by the former director of  Deloitte & Touche, And that the new one, apparently the DOS (the Democratic Opposition of Serbia) law on privatisation is also being written by one of the former directors of the same Belgrade Deloitte & Touche Are they fashion designers or economic consultants? First, they were selling us the illusion that, when necessary, we would have to sell 60% of our factory, and now they are giving us a better option – they would rather sell us all to some foreign investors as soon as they make a good bargain. In fact, along with the law on privatisation, they are planning to adopt the law on nationalisation... That company has already appointed one of its bureaucrats Ivanic to the post of Prime Minister of the Republic of Srpska – and that's what awaits us too. They turned Deloitte & Touche into Marx and Engels of Serbian capitalism.'

On February 12th, the socialist-radical opposition already criticised Vlahovic's law on halting the process of privatisation in the Serbian Parliament, putting the emphasis on Djindjic's intention to pilfer another 1.5 million employees in Serbia who have still not used of their 'free right' to social ownership and who will, allegedly, remain deprived of their free shares – they will allegedly be reduced from 70 billion DM to 40 billion DM. In 1997, the same estimates of the social property were made when the 'frozen' law on property transformation was adopted.

Unfortunately, Minister Aleksandar Vlahovic did not show enough wisdom in responding to these signals of criticism at the end of the debate in the Serbian Parliament. And, what is worse, he started offering some compromising solutions even at the beginning of the parliament session, as soon as he heard the rumours of a 'general strike' against the new course of privatisation organised by the Council of Independent Unions. So, it is likely that the first big move of Djindjic's new government – the change of the basic transitional process – will soon collapse. One badly conceived, inadequately prepared, absolutely desynchronized, poorly propagated, wrongly described – but quite a far-reaching reform action – seemed to be inaugurated impatiently, amateurishly, based on an incorrect concept and with a bad division of parts. The long compromised socialists could not hope for a better option than to be assigned with the supervision of the capital and social justice – it is particularly paradoxical since their crimes and corruption still remain unsolved. So far, even the socialists claim that the process of privatisation used to be deterred by the abnormal illusory foreign exchange rate – as if Zoran Djindjic and not Mirko Marjanovic set that exchange rate?!

Yet, not everything is doomed to a failure. It is important that we forget the silly theory of Serbia avoiding the crisis of privatisation that befell on Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro, and to bra in mind that the successes in Slovenia and Estonia are not implementable in our own case. The construction of a 'justifiable' or 'infallible privatisation', which is allegedly about to be invented by the Serbs, is quite perilous for the future of democratic forces in this country – and it is probably better to use a syntagm of 'inevitable privatisation', in order to prevent a bigger catastrophe. Consequently, the elementary logic leads us to think that no Belgrade brain will conceive something – that results only in some benefit and brings no harm to anyone – something that has not yet been conceived by anyone.

The problem of the world consultant company Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu with its Belgrade branch, which is based on a joint venture with the Economic Institute of Belgrade, is the problem 'excessive penetration' into a 'banana dictatorship'. That intelligent company failed to pay enough attention to the danger of becoming part of this system – i.e. to become the foundation of 'continuity' of that system even after the democratic changes. That is how we arrived to a funny situation in which Minister Aleksandar Vlahovic, as the former director of  Deloitte & Touche in Belgrade, has to confront the processes of privatisation in certain socialist firms – which he used to consult personally as that firm's director, and to find himself in an 'inhuman' position from which he has to refuse his accordance with the 'privatisation plan', signed, for example by Dank Djunic, as a new/old boss of that firm, the originator of the new/old law on privatisation, with new/old arguments and analyses, etc. No one will have any benefit from all that, certainly not some cautious foreign consultant companies, whereas the harm may befall on the working-class people and the industry in Serbia. Since, without big and expensive world consultants – nothing can be done.

Although my understanding of economy is pretty amateurish, I've always had a weakness towards clever consultants, so, last time when I was writing about the channel Dunav-Tisa, I noticed that the expert technological addendum to the whole project of the Kis brothers (1792), came from a certain Wolfgang von Kempelan  (1734–1804), a high official at the Austrian court. It was a famous mathematician, physicist and scientist, who had success in a number of local projects.

This consultant of the Austrian court became famous for his 'speaking machine' – Sprachmaschine (which produced speech, syllable by syllable) and the 'chess machine' – Schachmaschine (which was some kind of a robot draped in Turkish clothes, but really played chess with famous people, including Friedrich II and Napoleon I) throughout Europe, at the turn of the 19th century. Only later, in 1838, an English novelist managed to substantiate that the robot was actually mystified and that the machine included a real chess player – a very good one. However, Kempelan amassed fortune thanks to that robot, because he used it cautiously and with measure.